Notes on Hugo Münsterberg

To Münsterberg films were getting closer to 'complete cinema' which is bad because it is getting closer to reality with color/sound/etc, betraying the silent film. He celebrated the flatness of the image, silent films, the artifice in cinema. “We do not see the objective reality, but a product of our own mind which binds the pictures together.” Cinema can break time/space unlike theater. The photoplay mirrors how the mind works. Epistemology is that the cinema works as a brain. Flashbacks are important to him. We know the world through memory/imagination/emotion. The world of dreams + fantasy. Emotion comes from crosscutting. Méliès over Lumière. “It is the aim of art to isolate a significant part of our experience in such a way that it is separate from our practical life and is in complete agreement with itself.” The mind completes the art work. “Our mind is here and there, our mind turns to the present and then to the past; the photoplay can equal in its freedom from the bondage of the material world.” The playwright limited by the fundamental principle of real time. “It is certainly true for the photoplay that nothing has the right to existence in its midst which is not internally needed for the unfolding of the unified action.” Fundamental principle of art is the demand for unity. “A good photoplay must be isolated and complete in itself like a beautiful melody.” “The photoplay must bring action and pictorial expression into perfect harmony.” “The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions in moving pictures which, freed from the physical forms of space, time, and causality, are adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and which reach complete isolation from the practical world through the perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance.”

Quotations and ideas from Münsterberg's The Photoplay (1916)